The Graduate Speaker Series brings two to three outside scholars to speak to students and faculty in the Literature Department each semester. The series has attracted diverse dynamic intellectuals of national and international standing to speak about their work. We attempt to key the speakers to graduate classes offered each semester in order to highlight the scholarly debates occurring in the academy around a particular subject. Topics such as aesthetics, philosophy, history, biography, historiography, and critical history have found a place alongside critical and theoretical readings of texts, performances, and films.

Students are strongly encouraged to attend all talks since the discussion after each presentation offers invaluable opportunities for an exchange of questions and ideas between scholars and students.

2013-2014 Series

Spring 2014

Derrick Higginbotham
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Batelle-Tompkins Atrium
April 7, 4:00

Derrick Higginbotham is a Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Cape Town, South Africa as well as a co-director of the graduate program. He publishes chiefly on late medieval and early modern theatre, including a recent article on the representation of rape in Cardenio. Currently, he is finishing a book entitled Commercial Passions: Economic Practice and Self-Control on Late Medieval and Early Modern English Stages, which examines dramatic depictions of economic activity from the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries. His research interests include literary history, the ‘new’ economic criticism, as well as gender and sexuality studies. This paper on the depiction of Isaac in the York cycle is a part of the groundwork for a second book project on representations of queerness in premodern theater.

In my paper, I show that the York cycle’s dramatization of Isaac’s potential sacrifice expresses a distinctive investment in reproductive sexuality within marriage and its implied connection to the future. The socio-symbolic power that Lee Edelman identifies with the figure of ‘the Child’ in his book No Future, in a way, echoes this link between reproduction and the future that the York cycles dramatizes. Nevertheless, given that child sacrifice is an essential element of all Christologies, it and the York plays, I contend, turn Edelman’s theory on its head: God and Abraham both act in the name of the future but at the expense of the child, a loss that the cycle insists must not be forgotten. By combining a philological approach with queer theory, I argue that the York cycle queers Isaac through his resistance to both reproduction and the future; moreover, via typological association, it also queers Christ, which reveals how this foundational narrative is already marked by a constitutive queerness. In other words, I propose that the religious instantiation of reproductive futurity against which Edelman’s notion of queerness emerges, paradoxically, is itself queer.

Fall 2013

Chih-ming Wang
Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Hughes Formal Lounge
October 25, 5pm

In 1854 Yung Wing, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, returned to a poverty-stricken China, where domestic revolt and foreign invasion were shaking the Chinese empire. Inspired by the U.S. and its liberal education, Yung believed that having more Chinese students educated there was the only way to bring reform to China. Since then, generations of students from China have embarked on this transpacific voyage in search of modernity. What forces have shaped Chinese student migration to the U.S.? And what impact do they have on the formation of Asian America?

Based on Dr. Wang’s book, Transpacific Articulations: Student Migration and the Remaking of Asian America (University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), this talk will focus on the genealogy of study abroad narratives from the 1900s to the 1990s and the representation of foreign students in Asian American literary and cultural production — to provide a transpacific perspective into the study of Asian American literature.